American scientist Martin Harris wakes up from a coma and returns home expecting a warm loving embrace from his wife. But when another man answers the door claiming to also be ‘Martin Harris’, his world comes crashing down. Suddenly his wife no longer recognises him and there is someone else living his life with the memories and documents to prove it. How can there be two of him and more importantly, how can he prove that this man is lying?

No one in France knows who he is apart from the taxi driver who knocked him over three days before. He’s lost everything apart his memories but can he even trust them to be true? Is this a cruel plot against him or is he in fact the fake – Unknown is the thrilling quest he takes to find out why someone is trying to erase him from this world.

Cauwelart throws you straight as the book starts with the exact moment Martin arrives at his home to find his wife and the other ‘Martin’. With the narrative being purely from Martin’s point of view, we follow every aspect of his journey but are still left unsure as to who is right and who to believe. Martin’s character is slowly revealed in between all the action which adds both depth and even more confusion. Cauwelart makes sure that Martin is relatable enough for us to want him to be right but uses clever techniques to make us continue to doubt him. As the character gets more and more erratic, so does the narrative. Martin’s thoughts slowly start to jump from the present to past memories that perfectly capture the confusion someone would feel in this situation.

Cauwelart plays around with some very interesting topics but doesn’t develop them enough to make this novel as good as it could have been. But this is still a thrilling read for anyone who likes suspense.

Unknown was first released as ‘Out of My Head’ but the name change comes along with the film adaptation starring Liam Neeson which is in cinemas now.

By Nola Ojomu

Perhaps the most complex novel I have read to date, it took lengthy discussions with my family and a viewing of the high-grossing movie Avatar (yes, you read it right) to finally get my head wrapped around Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novel, Heart of Darkness.

If I gave you a basic plot line, it would be this: a group of men are sailing upon the river Thames on a dark and sombre evening. One of the men, a sea-man named Charles Marlow begins a narrative that charts his past expedition to the ‘Dark Continent’ as part of a Belgian colonial fleet. In search of pure, innocent (and naive!) adventure, he comes face to face with the insanity and brutality of colonisation and the direct effects on those colonising as well as those being colonised.

His main assignment is to retrieve a lost Officer named Kurtz (a man surrounded by mystery from the moment he is mentioned to the moment he is discovered) from the depths of the Congo. Slowly but surely Marlow gains a true sense of the depravity and hypocrisy of the officers around him and comes to identify solely with the enigmatic Mr Kurtz who turns out to be anything but a saint himself.

To find out why he would sympathise with someone who plunders ivory and inherently wants to ‘exterminate all the brutes’, you will just have to read it for yourself; no doubt it will take a focused reading and several moments of contemplation to come to a personal conclusion about this arguably controversial book.

I was not surprised to learn that acclaimed Nigerian writer, Chinua Achebe, had dedicated time to writing an explosive essay on the novel, venting his anger at the racist undertones of the writer and narrator. Africans are indeed ‘dehumanized’ within this novel in the sense that they are not given a ‘voice’. Instead, they are seen as savages who ‘stamp their feet’ and express emotion through ‘shrieks’ and ‘chanting’. As an understatement, this was not an easy book for me to digest and I too got easily caught up in Achebe’s frustration at the fact that the book is widely upheld by several literary critics.

As a side-note, Achebe even went a step further and wrote a novel to counter Heart of Darkness. Without going into too much detail, Achebe’s Things Fall Apart was written to show people that the so- called ‘creatures’ in Africa had a way of life that made sense to them before the arrival of colonists. They were not monkeys swinging from trees or incapable of calculated feelings and emotions; they had communities and hierarchies and their own systems of belief.

As much as I sympathise with Achebe’s observations, it is way too easy to fall into the trap of simply labelling the book racist. Yes, we may be well within our rights to consider the writer a racist but one must consider Conrad’s other intentions. Conrad shows us that within every human heart lies a darkness that runs so deep and knows no bounds when given free reign. Regardless of race or skin colour, all humans have a vast capacity for evil; even the ‘civilised’ citizens of the developed western world are presented metaphorically as the ‘living dead’ – they walk around in their own little bubbles completely unaware of what is ‘out there’, unaware of the damage they cause and incapable of seeing beyond themselves. At the end of the novel, I got the underlying message that it is those who openly admit to this sinister capacity (and in so doing, try to battle against it) – as opposed to playing the hypocrite with an ulterior motive – that can be considered remotely remarkable.

Conrad may have hidden his true beliefs between annoyingly bulky layers of narrative voices, but the overall message rings clear to me. In my opinion, this is not a book to be celebrated – for that would be the wrong word to use. Were I narrow-minded enough to see the book as simply racist, I would not even give it the time of day. But it is a book to be pondered and reflected upon. As humans, we are far from perfect and we can only strive for this impossible perfection. It is the choices we make that make us who we are. For me, it is my faith that keeps me in check but I cannot speak for others.

The question comes down to this: can you hold on to your conviction of what is wrong and right when you’re alienated and immersed in a strange situation? Can you hold on to this conviction even when it dawns on you that you have the capacity to do absolutely anything without consequence?

By Tomi Makanjuola

The Tempest is perhaps the most bizarre Shakespeare play I have read to date. Set on a mysterious, exotic Island, memorable characters are brought to life in scenes that are vibrant and often comical. Written between 1610 and 1611, The Tempest is thought to be the last play ever written by Shakespeare.

The inhabitants of this exotic island are Prospero, the rightful Duke of Milan, and his young daughter Miranda who were banished by Prospero’s usurping brother Anthonio. As Prospero finally recounts the full story to Miranda whom he now considers old enough to learn the truth about how they wound up on the island, Anthonio and his fellow counterparts are battling a raging storm aboard a ship close to the island. Slowly but surely, the audience learns that it is Prospero who is conjuring up the ‘tempest’ in an attempt to seek revenge on his treacherous sibling.

His apparent magical powers and ability to invoke the help of spirits – who create illusions to manipulate and confuse his enemies – is what drives the entire plot. As is typical to the Shakespearean romance genre, the audience is set for a barrage of mistaken identities and outlandish secondary characters who get mixed up peculiar situations that only get resolved in the closing scene.

It is hard to criticize any work of Shakespeare, after all he is considered the greatest playwright who ever lived. However, I have to say that a few of his characters were fairly stereotypical. Take Miranda, the protagonist’s daughter: not only is she ‘sweet’ and ‘gentle’ but the sub-plot involving the sickeningly sweet courtship between her and another character Ferdinand is full of elaborate and hyperbolic declarations of love. No doubt it is poetry at its finest but that doesn’t diminish its gag-inducing qualities.

If you’re new to Shakespeare then this could be the perfect play to start with. It is concise and immaculately structured yet bursting with comedic action.

By Tomi Makanjuuola who will be reading English at Oxford University

The Death of a Salesman, a modern domestic tragedy, was written by Arthur Miller in the late 1940s, a time when the search for the ‘American Dream’ was at the heart of most individuals. The American Dream was the idea that if a man worked hard and was determined enough, he would be able to achieve wealth and prosperity.

However, Miller creates a poignant character in this play whose life philosophy seems to be at odds with this. It is evident throughout the play that the protagonist, Willy Loman, values popularity and being ‘well-liked’ over hard work and determination and it could be argued that this is a crucial reason for his eventual downfall.

The familial chaos that is typical to most modern domestic tragedies stems from the fact that Willy is unable to deal, psychologically, with the realisation that his philosophy is incorrect; that being ‘well-liked’ does not amount to material success.

There is something wonderfully devastating in the way in which the Loman family disintegrates. In scenes that are superbly realised and packed with heated drama, Miller depicts the fundamental danger that lies in building a family unit out of lies and disillusionment – the danger in refusing to accept the other person for who they are and being content with the person they turn out to be.

Many critics of the play have commented on the fact that Death of a Salesman cannot be considered tragic because the central protagonist is not of a high social status and therefore his downfall is not as striking as it could have been had he fallen from grace from a higher position. However, I disagree with this view. The strength in this play lies in Miller’s ability to take an ordinary man, with whom we can identify with as everyday human beings, and show how the high hopes he may have built up his whole life can come crumbling down at the drop of a hat.

In the heartbreaking scene between Willy and his boss, Howard, we see Willy’s life shattered in a matter of minutes when he loses his life-long career. Willy inevitably breaks down and criticises the values of the modern world: ‘Today, it’s all cut and dried…no chance for bringing friendship to bear – or personality’.

I have always believed that the greatest fear of man is never turning out as great as he thinks he will and Miller brings this idea to life in a play that appears deceptively simple at face value. The theme of lost dreams is only a fraction of what Miller examines in this play; it is also replete with themes of guilt, loneliness and modern-day consumerism. For a thoughtful and reflective read that gets you re-examining personal life values, I would say give this play a go and you won’t regret it.

By Tomi Makanjuuola